About a month ago now our main computer at home suddenly “broke”. In the middle of the night I could hear it beeping repeatedly every few minutes. Turns out it was stuck in a perpetual reboot sequence and no matter what I tried I could not get it to boot up Windows XP. Not safe mode of any sort. Even the OEM OS installation CD would end up blue screening during install.
I was horrified. My fancy Athlon dual core x64 monster machine, with 2GB of memory and mirrored RAID disks crashed!? Frustration set in for a few days and I couldn’t bare to even look at the mess. A few days later I got the idea to use an old Ubuntu Linux LiveCD I’d burned but never installed.
Now understand it’s been a while since I’ve done a personal linux installation, so I was a bit rusty with my “fdisk” and other admin tasks. Fortunately I was able to temporarily mount each mirror disk as a separate mount point (read-only NTFS).
Woohoo, my files appeared to be there – twice in fact as I was using the built-in (soft) RAID built into my nvidia chipset. One problem – now what do I do?
To summarize the data involved, it’s a 300GB NTFS partition, maybe 190GB used. Of that I probably only really care about 90GB of media files (tons of MP3s dating nearly 10 years old, movies, and hundreds of personal photos of kids and stuff).
Here’s some options I can think of.
1) using a linux live CD I can burn a whole lot of DVD+/-R disks. Assuming no compression, that’s almost 20 DVDs (90GB/4.7GB=~19.1). That’ll waste a lot of media and be very slow in both directions. Plus I still need a final destination.
2) Abandon the whole fake-RAID bullshit that got may have got me into trouble to start with. I can perform a clean linux install onto one of my mirror disks (300GB each). Mount the other disk read-only NTFS, and copy whatever files are of interest to the Linux partition. From there I can export them via Samba/NFS, burn DVDs or whatever.   Once I’m happy that my data is alive and well in linux, I can re-purpose the second NTFS disk as a linux partition and implement some proper backup process between the disks.
3) Spend money on another drive. Mount in with the LiveCD and copy the data to that.
3a) If I went the external disk route that seems like a clever idea, but unless I used “FAT” or dared to use writable NTFS in linux, only linux boxes could mount the disk.
3b) If I go internal, I just install linux onto the new disk as Joe Sixpack would, then mount one of the disks, and basically follow #2. The difference is I might be able to repurpose both 300GB as a linux RAID, but that seems almost silly considering that I might have a hardware RAID issue. Alternatively I could just have 2x300GB of fresh linux partitions to use for mega-media storage.
At this point I’m leaning towards #2. Please post comments if there are other considerations, or concerns.
Thanks
-Sean
